Turkish soap opera Noor brings tourist boom to Istanbul

The famous mosques and historical palaces lining the Bosphorus elicit little more than polite interest from the boat's passengers. But as a luxurious waterfront villa comes into view, crowds swarm to the side of the boat. Cameras appear suddenly from the enveloping folds of black chadors.

Forget Topkapi Palace, this is where the Turkish soap opera Noor was filmed.

With its glamorous cast and extreme plotlines, Noor has become a phenomenon across the Middle East, sparking a tourism boom to Turkey that drew 105,000 visitors from Arab countries in May alone this year – an increase of about 33% on last year. First airing on the Saudi MBC satellite channel in early 2008, its final episode was seen by nearly 80 million viewers from Palestine to Morocco.

Noor, starring Turkish actors Songül Öden and Kivanç Tatlitug (pictured), tells the story of a girl from the country who marries into a wealthy Istanbul family – a modern day Cinderella story of sorts, albeit one that includes a lot of foreplay, an illegitimate child and some prison time for Noor herself.

Continue reading: Turkish soap opera Noor brings tourist boom to Istanbul

Pashas: Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World by James Mather

William Dalrymple applauds an exemplary study of the 16th-century Levant Company and England's dealings with the mighty Ottoman empire

For 200 years, from the mid-15th century, the Ottoman Empire was the most powerful force in all Eurasia and Constantinople was the Mediterranean's greatest port. The sultan and his viziers ruled a great patchwork of peoples, languages and religions, an empire comparable in size and importance to that of Rome. Decisions made in Ottoman Constantinople affected millions across the globe, from Ireland through Poland to Sumatra. There was no other city in Europe that in size or grandeur could begin to compare.

1. Pashas: Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World
2. by James Mather
3. 320pp,
4. Yale University Press

By contrast, 16th- and 17th-century England was a small and relatively impoverished mono-religious and mono-lingual state, perched precariously on the cold northern edge of Christendom. Compared with the might of the Ottomans, it was neither a major political nor military power. Although Britain's navy was sufficient to defend it from its immediate neighbours, Ottoman technological superiority at sea led to the capture of large numbers of British vessels and by the 1620s the Turkish navy had extended its reach into the waters of the British Isles.

Yet despite this, much of the contact between Britain and the Ottoman empire was both peaceable and profitable. After the founding of the English Levant Company in 1581, through a charter of Queen Elizabeth I, Britain was closely engaged with the Turks as the Ottoman empire expanded westwards through central Europe and Britain's trade network expanded eastwards to meet it. The company sold wool and tin (to be used in Ottoman armaments and munitions production) and in return bought huge quantities of Ottoman silks, Indian spices and indigo and, oddly enough, currants.

There was, in consequence, a great deal of movement between the two worlds. Elizabethan London had a burgeoning Muslim community that encompassed a large party of Turkish ex-prisoners, some Moorish craftsmen, a number of wealthy Turkish merchants and a "Moorish solicitor". At the same time, large numbers of Englishmen – from traders and diplomats to renegades and galley slaves – lived in Ottoman lands. When Charles II sent Captain Hamilton to ransom some Englishmen who had been enslaved on the Barbary Coast, they refused to return: the men had converted to Islam and were now "partaking of the prosperous Successe of the Turks... they are tempted to forsake their God for the love of Turkish women," wrote Hamilton. "Such ladies are," he added, "generally very beautiful."

James Mather's wonderful book is the first full-length study since 1935 of the Levant Company, the organisation that oversaw both England's trade and diplomacy with the Ottoman world, and which supervised and set the tone for the odd yet remarkably successful relationship between the two. As Mather shows, by the end of the 17th century trade with Turkey accounted for one quarter of all England's overseas commercial activity. It was the first non-Christian ­environment in which Englishmen established a major and distinct national presence and was an important and largely forgotten precursor to the centuries of empire ahead.

Yet as Mather is at pains to emphasise, there was an important distinction between these early contacts and the later colonial relationships that grew out of them. The attitude of the Jacobean travellers was utterly different from the arrogance of their Victorian successors. In the Ottoman Middle East, it was they and not their alien associates who had to conform; indeed, at this period, most Turks had never heard of England and as one imprisoned Englishmen put it, in Ottoman Jerusalem "the Turks flatly denied... they had ever heard of either of [his] Queen or country".

Mather excels at portraying the ­everyday life of the Englishmen who joined the Levant Company. He traces their recruitment, apprenticeship and training and the adventure of their maiden voyage out: "The Seae beating sometimes into my very Cabin; & I tossd & tumbled sometime my bed upon mee, & sometimes I upon my bed... all wet & dabbled, & in a confusion of Torments." Another factor compared life on ship to "imprisonment... with a chance of drowning besides".

Many seem to have lived like modern expats, keeping to their own compounds, importing their own cider, butter, beer and bacon, playing "bowles" and "krickett", indulging in amateur dramatics and drinking too much. The Aleppo factors even imported their own pack of English hounds. Others mixed in, recording the detail of Ottoman life in a series of fascinating dispatches, though few Englishmen seem to have had as much intimacy with Ottoman life as Francesco Lupazzoli, the priapic Venetian consul in Smyrna, who lived until he was 114, fathering no less than 126 children, 105 of them illegitimate, from his five wives and innumerable Smyrniot mistresses. The English factors, in contrast, had to vow to avoid all indulgence in "fornication and matrimony" as well as "cards, dice, tables, taverns and playhouses".

It is a fascinating and little studied subject and Mather's work is a major contribution to the historiography of Britain's relationship both with the Mediterranean and the world of Islam, which at that point was much more tolerant than religiously repressive Reformation Europe. It is also a vital corrective to the influential but wrong-headed readings of the flagbearers of intellectual Islamophobia such as VS Naipaul and Bernard Lewis, both of whom have manufactured entirely negative images of one of the most varied empires of history and the complicated European relationship with the Ottoman world.

One of the most interesting questions Mather raises is why the Levant Company never went the way of its younger contemporary, the East India Company, and turned into an empire-building, land-seizing, imperial-military power. After all, in the early years, the two companies overlapped to a considerable extent in terms of both investors and personnel: in the 1630s, 28 of the 47 directors of the East India Company court were also Levant Company members. It was not, he believes, for lack of opportunity so much as because of the conservative way in which the Levant Company was managed. It always erred on the side of caution and tried to avoid the devastating expenses incurred by its India counterpart in the course of its military adventures.

Ironically, though, it was the East India Company that eventually helped bring down the company that had inspired its birth. After the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt, the East India Company moved into the country and the Levant Company sank into financial impotence. Yet at its height in the 1630s, it was "the most flourishing and beneficial company to the commonwealth of any in England" and the agent through which Britain engaged with and interacted with the Islamic world. Given this, the importance of this excellent and balanced study cannot be underestimated.

William Dalrymple's most recent book is Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India (Bloomsbury)

Source: The Guardian: Pashas: Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World by James Mather

Camel fair’s trek into the past

AL GHARBIA // The question that had to be asked was, “Why walk all that distance?” Hamad bin Ramis al Minhali had what should have been the obvious answer.

“Why would we truck the camels over here?” he asked. “It’s not the Bedouin way. Our grandfathers trekked across all the deserts of Arabia. Our journey lasted only 22 days but their journeys often lasted for months or simply never ended as they trekked from one oasis to another to trade and sell goods with other tribes.”

His answer was one that reflected the spirit of the Al Dhafra Camel Festival, meant to celebrate and preserve the culture, heritage and tradition of the Arab desert nomad.

For Mr al Minhali, 25, and his father, Ramis bin Saleh, an Emirati, the trek to the event in the Al Gharbia town saw them drive the 1,000km at camel speed from the Saudi city of Al Kharj.

Yesterday afternoon they, along with an entourage consisting of 50 Majaheem camels, family members, and dozens of members of their tribe, had only 3km to go to reach their encampment.

The scene was a spectacular one as the camels made their way from paved roads across rust-coloured sand dunes, followed by more than 30 4x4 vehicles and a dozen men and boys on foot.

Inside the vehicles traditional Arabian music was blaring over the stereo speakers as both men and young girls danced in their seats to it.

They were in a celebratory mood as they approached the normally sleepy town, which had once again come to life with the start of the third annual festival.

For the past week, camels have been the spectacle as they slowly strolled through the town’s central district, making their way to Madinat Zayed.

The 50 camels had cost the al Minhali family Dh11 million (US$3m) to purchase. With some pride, Mr al Minhali the younger said: “One of them my father bought for Dh5m. He is a stud and is worth so much because he is a purebred and has fathered several calves.

“He won’t be up for sale during the festival but we brought him to show him. But, then again, if someone makes an extremely generous offer, my father might consider it.”

Continue reading The National: Camel fair’s trek into the past

Feminism in the Arab world Is the region ready to embrace it?

As the debate on feminism in the region gathers momentum, opinions on the matter are strongly divided. Some believe the so called Western concept of feminism has no place in the Arab world. Yet Arab women are still fighting for an equal place in society, academics and students argue.

Dr Monica Gallant, chair of the business department at Dubai Women's College, has been evaluating what form of feminism best fits the Arab context. Her paper titled The Application of Feminism in the Arab World: Research Perspectives, which won an Outstanding Paper award after it was published in the Education, Business and Society: Contemporary Middle Eastern Issues journal, argues that it is possible for Arab women to create a "sustainable, emancipatory movement by gradually challenging patriarchal discourses while still maintaining a connection to key societal norms".

Discussions on Arab feminism must consider Islamic principles and any successful feminist movement should be gradual and must take into account cultural views so as not to alienate women from their societies, Gallant said. "Women don't want to vary too much from what society expects from them."

Having lived in the UAE for 14 years, her research reveals the importance placed on expectations of women in the Arab world. This in turn affects how women view themselves.

"Arab women wouldn't want to see themselves as feminists because it is too Western and anti-men," she said.

Instead she observed that Arab women work within societal expectations to gradually gain freedom of choice for themselves by working with what society expects of them.

"While being a mother and a wife she tries to be an entrepreneur or employee," Gallant said. "She fulfils her home duties and tries to live her dream, which is tough because she has to be a superwoman to be able to do everything."

Social expectations

Gallant said in the Arab world the expectations of women to be wives and mothers are still very strong. "Women can't voluntarily admit to not wanting to become a wife or mother," she said, because some social expectations are still difficult for women to overcome.

To illustrate her point Gallant used the example of an unmarried woman moving out of her family's home to live alone.

Dr Suad Zayed Al Oraim, professor of sociology at UAE University, however, argued that "if a single woman is comfortable in that role it's up to her".

She said individuals are responsible for creating change which then goes on to become a social phenomenon. "Someone has to pioneer it," she said.

Using the same example, Suad said there is no civil law or Sharia (Islamic) law in the UAE preventing a woman from living alone.

"These are cultural laws; if a woman is willing to bear the consequences it's up to her," she said. "[But] Islam is not responsible for those consequences because it is cultural and we need to differentiate between tradition and religion."

Feminism inappropriate

There is no place for Westernised feminism in the Arab world due to existing cultural and religious differences in societies, some academics and students said.

Arab women are fighting for an equal place in society but not under the umbrella of feminism because the term indicates a gender struggle which is primarily a Western ideal, they said.

"The ideology of feminism came from the US and Europe and you can't sell it to Arab culture," said Suad. "If women in the UAE and other Arab countries want to create something new for themselves, it's up to them to do it."

Declaring an existence

Suad attended the region's first conference on Arab feminism in Beirut, Lebanon, last year. She said the purpose was to establish if feminism exists in any of the 22 Arab nations.

"In the Arab world the expression is not clear because it doesn't exist in the culture," she said. "Some countries understand Arab feminism from an Arab point of view and others from a Western one."

Suad added: "Yet women don't want to talk about it because it's not clear in the minds of a majority of women in the Arab world."

For Iraqi pharmacy student Sura Sa'ad, studying at the Ras Al Khaimah Medical and Health Sciences University, Arab women need to decide what they want.

"It is our duty as women to first declare what rights we want and second it is our responsibility to show ... these rights don't cross our traditions or religion," she said.

Misconceptions

"Women make up half of any society and if half of society has no rights or education then how will society ever develop?" said Sa'ad.

She added that some women mistake feminism or liberation as a right to dress however they want and go wherever they want. "[Feminism] is about respecting us and treating us equally to men so we can help in the process of development."

Sa'ad said a major problem with many Arab governments is that "they talk about women's rights but in reality they don't exist".

Similarly, Hassan Al Hassany, an architecture student at the Canadian University of Dubai, said: "It is all about male domination. There is no Arab country in which a woman rules or leads as president or prime minister. This gives you a good impression that Arab feminism doesn't fit in the Arab world."

Pioneering change

Sa'ad has lived in Iraq, Jordan and now in the UAE, which she says is the most respectful of women's rights to education and work.

Yet working women in the Arab world is nothing new, Suad emphasised. "There have been women in the workplace since the 1940s in countries such as Algeria, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon."

However, regarding Sa'ad's opinion about the UAE's social justice towards women, this could be in large part due to the initiatives of Her Highness Shaikha Fatima Bint Mubarak, Wife of the late Shaikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan and Chairwoman of the UAE General Women's Union.

Shaikha Fatima pushed for Emirati women to excel in the development of their nation. Yet she does not regard herself as a feminist. She was once quoted as having said: "I see myself as being behind a great man and my role is limited to being a wife and mother to the sons of a great leader."

Islam and feminism

Continue reading: Gulf News: Feminism in the Arab world,Is the region ready to embrace it?

Twelve months

Elias Muhanna reviews a year of realignments in Middle Eastern politics.

The year 2009 began with the Middle East ablaze. On January 1, for the fifth day running, Israeli jets continued to pummel Gaza in advance of a ground invasion that produced over 1,000 Palestinian deaths and hundreds of thousands of refugees. The war’s effects rippled across the region in an all too familiar way: suicide bombers in Iraq targeted groups of civilians protesting the Gaza invasion, while America’s allies in the region criticised Hamas for provoking the onslaught. Meanwhile, Iran castigated Egypt for collaborating with the enemy and Syria called off its peace negotiations with Israel. The region had slipped back into the trenches of its Cold War, in which a single Katyusha could trigger a massive military response and an international diplomatic crisis.

A year later, the atmosphere in the region is markedly different. Bitter rivals have visited each other’s capitals to mend fences and the media is full of reports about a new age of reconciliation and diplomatic engagement. Following the turmoil of the previous five years, which witnessed a series of proxy wars between the Western-supported Sunni Arab regimes and the axis consisting of Iran, Syria, and their non-state allies (Hamas and Hizbollah), the relative calm that prevailed in 2009 was just one of many signs that a realignment of interests had begun to take shape.

The reasons for this realignment stem from two basic uncertainties. On the one hand, there is a question mark about the effects of a new – and still seemingly undefined – American policy for the region. Indeed, as disruptive as the neoconservative experiment was to Arab power dynamics, the presence of a new administration in Washington with a different outlook and a different set of priorities has forced the region to reorganise itself once again. On the other hand, Iran’s growing influence and the concomitant challenges to its regime’s authority have further muddied the waters, as its allies and adversaries try to gauge the health and durability of the Islamic Republic on its 30th anniversary. When these two unknown variables are combined, in attempts to assess shifting American policy toward the volatile regional heavyweight, the tea leaves become all the more difficult to read.

While the entire world may have caught a whiff of the sense of optimism and renewal that swept through the United States in January, the Middle East surely felt its impact in an even bigger way. The Arabs heralded Obama’s election as though he were one of their own, laying claim to his Muslim ancestry and Arabic name, and holding out hope that his administration would bring about a major reorientation of America’s diplomatic posture in the Middle East. These hopes crested in early June, when Obama delivered his famous address to the Muslim world from Cairo. Following the speech, he was lionised for weeks by the Arab press, with some commentators going so far as to claim that it was Obama’s influence that led the March 14 coalition to victory in the Lebanese parliamentary elections and ushered the Iranian Green Movement into the streets of Tehran.

A gross overstatement, to be certain. But there was no mistaking the new American approach, from Obama’s much-discussed Persian New Year greetings, to his “Day One” strategy vis-à-vis the Arab-Israeli peace process, which had lain dormant for seven years under Bush. At the same time, however, the inchoate character of this new policy meant that while many of the old battle lines had been rubbed out, the new ones had yet to emerge. The result: a sea of uncertainty and bet-hedging, as the region’s political elite shifted their foreign policies into neutral – if not yet into reverse.

Nowhere was this sense of ambivalence more evident than in Lebanon, always a trusty barometer of regional political dynamics. A historic parliamentary election resulted in a repeat victory for the pro-American majority and a surprise defeat for the Iran and Syria-backed opposition. However, rather than leveraging the win into an effort to curtail Hezbollah’s military capabilities – once a central plank of the March 14 agenda – the Lebanese prime minister, Saad Hariri, spent four months putting together a national unity government that gave his former political opponents a large share of power.

This accommodation was virtually mandated by a larger rapprochement between Lebanon’s two principal foreign sponsors, Saudi Arabia and Syria, whose leaders also buried the hatchet in 2009 after four years of deep hostility and proxy warfare. As the Obama White House signalled its openness to re-establishing diplomatic relations with Syria, the Saudis silenced their media attacks on Damascus and began to explore ways in which to woo Bashar al Assad away from the encroaching influence of Iran.

Indeed, the “Iranian question” looms large in the new calculus of Arab reconciliation. As America has shifted its attention from the Gulf to Afghanistan, Iraq’s neighbours have found increased latitude to shape the occupation’s aftermath. Their main concern has been to check Iran’s influence over the Shiite-dominated government, empowering Sunni factions to provide a counterbalance thereto. Washington’s determination to deal with Tehran through engagement rather than coercion has fuelled Arab suspicion that Obama sees an expanded Iranian sphere of influence as an acceptable price to pay in the larger calculations about America’s global strategy.

Continue reading The National: Twelve months

Veils, gold, calligraphy

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie considers the mixed crop of new books surveying Middle Eastern art practices.

In early October, the Dow Jones news agency warned that the emerging market for Middle Eastern art was crashing, with prices falling by as much as 50 per cent. Matthew Girling, a chief executive with the auction house Bonhams, said the global financial crisis had hit the market particularly hard because it was still so new, and because its collector base was still so thin. A week later, Bonhams staged a sale of contemporary Arab, Iranian and South Asian art in Dubai; the results supported this prognosis. The auction fared reasonably well, raking in $1.8 million (Dh6.6m), but this was nowhere near the mark Bonhams made in early 2008, when its Dubai debut earned a thumping $13 million (Dh47.8m) and broke 33 world records in one go, charting some of the highest prices ever paid for Middle Eastern art.

It is too soon to tell whether this drop in prices signifies a market correction or a bubble bursting. But that probably isn’t the most interesting question. More to the point: How did the market for Middle Eastern art heat up so quickly, and why? Five years ago, it was a nonexistent category. Now it is a commodity. What changed, and to what effect?

September 11, 2001 is a convenient place to start the story of how interest in art from the Middle East developed. But in the 1980s and 1990s, artists such as Shirin Neshat, Mona Hatoum and Ghada Amer were gaining prominence in the art world by showing their work in powerhouse galleries and high-profile biennials. Later on, artists such as Walid Raad and Emily Jacir attracted considerable critical acclaim. Before 2001, all five of them were already stars on the merits of their work. Sure, there was noise about their biographies and backgrounds. But they were unknown to each other and working in very different ways.

Ghada Amer was primarily a painter layering muscular, abstract expressionist brush strokes over delicately tangled threads in a peek-a-boo routine with drawings of women in auto-erotic poses. Mona Hatoum, with her deep roots in performance art, was making sculptures and installations that commented on power, domesticity and the industrial prison complex. Shirin Neshat’s photographs and film work could be read, with some generosity, as an embellishment on Cindy Sherman-style role-playing and self-portraiture.

These artists were not clumped together as Middle Eastern artists until after 2001. This made sense: what they shared was incidental. In the near or distant past they had come from a part of the world that was vastly complicated, egregiously misunderstood, faintly exotic and – given a certain convergence of factors that had little or nothing to do with art – in the news all the time. In the 1980s and 1990s, that was not enough to create a curatorial area of interest, much less a sales category.

But that changed after September 11, the war in Iraq, and the so-called war on terror. These events and the discourses they engendered did not in and of themselves lead the international art world to the Middle East. But the mainstream media probably did, albeit indirectly. Against the fear-mongering of, say, Fox News, curators, critics and collectors began to seek out the more nuanced narratives afforded by contemporary art. For some, it was a search for balance and a more complex picture of current events. For others, it was about discovering art’s capacity to make sense of trauma . The experiences of artists from Beirut to Baghdad suddenly offered important lessons for the world.

Unfortunately, although the art world’s visitors to the region in the early years of this decade said they were looking for artists whose work would complicate or contradict stereotypical images of the Middle East, the artists whose work they found often conformed to those same stereotypes. Moreover, plenty of impresarios came to the region to pad sales catalogues and support what would soon be perceived as the nub of an emerging market. For them, the work needed to “look” like the Middle East, or at least some half-baked, abstract, neo-orientalist, harem fantasy of the Middle East – veils, calligraphy, embroidery and gold.

In the last seven years or so, disparate artists have been gathered into groups and presented as collective representations of the region. This has happened through sprawling exhibitions, from Catherine David’s Contemporary Arab Representations and Jack Persekian’s DisORIENTation to Without Boundary at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Arabise Me at the V&A and Unveiled at the Saatchi Gallery in London. The pioneering artists from the 1980s and 1990s have been piled onto the bandwagon of Middle Eastern art, and made exemplars of “the scene” at its best. In reality, there is no such thing as the Middle Eastern art scene. But for better or worse, the group shows – whether strong, thoughtful, crass or confused – created the illusion otherwise.

Continue reading- The National: Veils, gold, calligraphy

Robert Fisk’s World: In a remote corner of China lies a tiny patch of Muslim freedom

Some of the Arabic is misspelled. The "F" has sometimes been written as "R", the gravestones occasionally carrying adjectives in the wrong place. But it's Muslim, no doubt about it.

There are enough half-moons on the cracked concrete to tell you that this little corner of a foreign field owes its existence to a prophet in a far distant land – a desert so far away that when I asked a Chinese security guard for the nearest mosque, he directed me to a Sikh temple. Welcome to Hong Kong, People's Republic of China, home to almost a quarter of a million Muslims.

Yes, we know about the Uighurs – though there are precious few in Hong Kong – and this little democratic bit of the great communist nation boasts a hidden cathedral, an ancient pagoda and the skin of the last wild tiger shot on the island – a black ratty bit of fur, all that's left of the handiwork of Indian policeman Rur Singh who shot the 240lb, 73-inch long, 3ft-high beast after it padded up to the Stanley Police Station, under Japanese occupation in 1942.

But somehow the Muslims of Hong Kong remain even more alien to this unique place than the Brit financiers and brokers and the memorials to a lost empire. And when I ask to see the chief imam of Hong Kong – a title to reflect upon – he turns out to be a Pakistani from Multan, busy arranging residence cards for his flock, happy to extol the delights of his temporary multibillion-dollar homeland. "We are free," he announces. "We are independent. We have a good relationship with the police." When non-locals praise local policemen, I always look at them askance. But Mufti Mohamed Arshad – trained at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, frequenter of Lebanon, Syria and Qatar – insists there are several Muslims in the Hong Kong police force, though they have to speak Chinese.

The first Muslims to reach Hong Kong reportedly from Malaya arrived well over a century and a half ago – fishermen and traders who turned up for a few days and decided to stay, men for the most part whose families originally came from Yemen. After the British arrived on the "barren rock" – this was Palmerston's phrase – in 1841, they brought in their Indian regiments, which contained thousands of Muslims. The first mosque was built in 1896 near the Kowloon barracks.

Haj Mohamed has his own military background; he was religious affairs education officer in the Pakistan air force, serving in Islamabad and Quetta before arriving in Hong Kong in 2001. Indeed, Pakistani pilots used to travel to the People's Republic for training. So Mufti Mohamed is a safe pair of hands. No wonder he gets on with the security forces. But there are good relations between all religions – the mufti holds interfaith meetings – and when demonstrations were held on the island to protest at Israel's ferocious bombardment of Gaza almost 12 months ago, Muslims were outnumbered by non-Muslims. A non-Chinese Jewish businessman told me that many Chinese businessmen knew little about the Middle East "except for five minutes on CNN". He was very, very wrong.

About 100,000 of Hong Kong's Muslims have the right to work and hold residence papers; the same number are domestic helpers and there are a few hundred asylum-seekers from Somalia, Pakistan and other Muslim countries. Thirty thousand are Chinese Muslims, refugees from the mainland during British days or born in Hong Kong to refugee parents. There's a Chinese Muslim imam at the Osman Ramju Sadick Islamic Centre, where I find a brace of outrageously polite children learning the Koran, reciting the "sura" while sitting on a high-pile rug, a weirdly Chinese script from the Koran – a mixture of Arabic characters with Chinese squiggles in the middle – on the wall above them.

"Mosque" doesn't really translate into Mandarin or Cantonese and the best version I got was "qing zhen si", or "pure truth temple" – I guess that's why I got misdirected to the Sikh temple in the first place. "Allah" comes out in translation from Chinese as "True God", "Islam" as "Pure Truth". As Imam Sulieman Wang pointed out to me, "When there are no words in Chinese for 'Koran' or 'Hadith', it was difficult for most Chinese to understand what we believed in."

Source: The Independent, Robert Fisk’s World: In a remote corner of China lies a tiny patch of Muslim freedom

Spot On PR’s MENA Twitter Demographics & User Habits Survey

A new and enticing survey was conducted on Twitter use among peoples of the Middle East & North Africa. The survery, much like the Harvard Mapping of the Arabic Blogosphere earlier this year provides some interesting information.

Summary of the report: Spot On PR’s MENA Twitter Demographics & User Habits Survey

The report: Middle East & North Africa Twitter Demographics & User Habits Survey

Not even a civil war could stop the old bookbinder of Beirut

Riyad is a man who gives context to this city in which I have lived these 33 years

They call him "Sheikh Tijlid" – Sheikh Binder – because he is the oldest and the most honoured bookbinder in Beirut.

There are only five left in Lebanon, repairing old newspapers, handwritten 17th-century Korans, ministry archives, cutting and pasting and then modelling fine leather covers and impressing on that wonderful soft leather the title of each volume in gold leaf. Riyad Shaker al-Khabbaz lives for his bunker of an office with its ancient iron presses, its century-old steel Arabic typeface from Germany, France and England. Some of his presses come from the homes of priests – who were the bookbinders of Beirut in centuries past.

He hands me a Koran, written in black and red ink, the margins adorned with yet more handwriting, interpretations of the sura – 300, 400 years old? – and he tells me about his client. "He is a man who greatly loves a Lebanese woman and he wants to give this to her as a gift. It is worth $100,000."

Fisk picks up the hundreds of ancient pages, so light that they move like feathers, radiating age and a world we shall never recover, unless, I suppose, we believe the words of the holy book. Its original leather covers are coloured crimson and green and gold and they rest in my hands like parchment. "Sheikh Tijlid" will have to repair them – he prefers the word "reconstitute" – just as he does the protective leather of the Bibles which churches still bring to him.

Bookbinding is an ancient art – The Independent's Beirut archives are being steadily bound in leather in Riyad's shop next to the old Turkish Serail, once a Turkish army stables, now the office of the prime minister (which, currently, alas, Lebanon does not have). Riyad is a man who gives context to the city in which I have lived these past 33 years, an institution older than the constitution of his own country, which may be why ministers and MPs and clergymen and wise men and – of course – criminals seek his help.

He stayed in this little two-roomed office and in his home nearby throughout the 15-year civil war. "The rockets exploded around me here but I was always honest and neither I nor my family were ever hurt."

He has a surprising smile, this little 74-year-old man, his big, bespectacled eyes giving him the appearance of a friendly mole, talking of duty to God and the importance of personal integrity. He sometimes makes me believe in that rarest of animals, an honest Lebanese businessman.

"During the war, a Palestinian came to me and he said he had 100,000 Lebanese passports. He wanted me to print names in them. If I did, he said, he would give me $100,000. This was during the war; there was no business, no money. So I asked my wife for her advice. She said: 'What are you waiting for?' I told her the Syrians (their 40,000 soldiers were installed in Lebanon at the time) would kill me. I said to my wife: 'So you would sacrifice me for $100,000?' This Palestinian man bought an apartment for each of his children – and then he died. So who was the idiot? Me! In those days, $100,000 could have bought me a mountain!"

But Riyad has always stood by his honesty. Which is why the great and the good of Lebanese society have flocked to his ill-painted double doors. Walid Jumblatt, leader of the Lebanese Druze and my favourite nihilist (and dinner host), often calls. So did Kamel Asaad, former speaker of the Lebanese parliament, Bahij Tabbara, a former minister, the Hariri family. On a high shelf is a curled sheaf of white leather, a dark reminder of murder and chaos. "Bashir Gemayel sent this leather to me and I used to frame his photo albums for him. Always in white."

Source: The Independent, Not even a civil war could stop the old bookbinder of Beirut

Why I Love Al Jazeera

The Arab TV channel is visually stunning, exudes hustle, and covers the globe like no one else. Just beware of its insidious despotism. by Robert D. Kaplan

Has anyone watched the English-language version of Al Jazeera lately? The Qatar-based Arab TV channel’s eclectic internationalism—a feast of vivid, pathbreaking coverage from all continents—is a rebuke to the dire predictions about the end of foreign news as we know it. Indeed, if Al Jazeera were more widely available in the United States—on nationwide cable, for example, instead of only on the Web and several satellite stations and local cable channels—it would eat steadily into the viewership of The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer. Al Jazeera—not Lehrer—is what the internationally minded elite class really yearns for: a visually stunning, deeply reported description of developments in dozens upon dozens of countries simultaneously.

Over just a few days in late May, when I actively monitored Al Jazeera (although I watched it almost every evening during a month in Sri Lanka), I was treated to penetrating portraits of Eritrean and Ethiopian involvement in the Somali war, of the struggle of Niger River rebels against the Nigerian government in the oil-rich south of the country, of the floods in Bangladesh, of problems with the South African economy, of the danger that desertification poses to Bedouin life in northern Sudan, of the environmental devastation around the Aral Sea, of Sikh violence in India after an attack on a temple in Austria, of foreign Islamic fighters in the southern Philippines, of microfinancing programs in Kenya, of rigged elections in South Ossetia, of human-rights demonstrations in Guatemala, and of much more. Al Jazeera covered the election campaigns in Lebanon and Iran in more detail than anyone else, as well as the Somali war and the Pakistani army offensive in the Swat Valley. There was, too, an unbiased one-hour documentary about the Gemayel family of Christian politicians and warlords in Lebanon, and a half-hour-long investigation of the displacement of the poor from India’s new economic zones.

The fact that Doha, Qatar’s capital, is not the headquarters of a great power liberates Al Jazeera to focus equally on the four corners of the Earth rather than on just the flash points of any imperial or post-imperial interest. Outlets such as CNN and the BBC don’t cover foreign news so much as they cover the foreign extensions of Washington’s or London’s collective obsessions. And Al Jazeera, rather than spotlighting people who are loaded with credentials but often have little to say, has the knack of getting people on air who have interesting things to say, like the brilliant, no-name Russian analyst I heard explaining why both Russia and China need the current North Korean regime because it provides a buffer state against free and democratic South Korea.

Al Jazeera is also endearing because it exudes hustle. It constantly gets scoops. It has had gritty, hands-on coverage across the greater Middle East, from Gaza to Beirut to Iraq, that other channels haven’t matched. Its camera crew, for example, was the first to beam pictures from Mingora, the main town of Swat, enabling Al Jazeera to confirm that the Pakistani military had, in fact, prevailed there over the Taliban.

And Al Jazeera also excels at opening your mind. I have spent the past two years reporting from the Indian Ocean region, dealing predominantly with Muslims and indigenous nongovernmental organizations; watching Al Jazeera is the vicarious equivalent of engaging in the kinds of conversations I have been having. One of the multitude of problems I have with Fox News is that even its most analytically brilliant commentators, such as Charles Krauthammer, seem to be scoring points and talking to their own ideological kind rather than engaging in dialogue with others. Watching Fox, you have to wonder whether many of its commentators have ever had a conversation with a real live Muslim abroad.

Of course, Al Jazeera has some overt prejudices. In covering the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, for example, it is clearly on the Palestinian side. Tear-jerking features about the sufferings of the Palestinians are not matched with equal coverage of the Israeli human terrain. What you get from Al Jazeera is the developing-world point of view, or, more specifically, that of the emerging developing-world bourgeoisie; and that outlook is inherently pro-Palestinian, as well as deeply hostile to American military power. You can actually measure President Barack Obama’s partial success in already changing America’s image abroad by the positive coverage he has been getting lately from Al Jazeera.

Overlying Al Jazeera’s pro-Palestinian and anti-Bush sentiment is a breezy, pacifist-trending internationalism. In too many of its reports, the subliminal message appears to be that compromise should be the order of the day. According to Al Jazeera, the politically weak, merely by being so, are automatically in the right. A certain kind of moral equivalency is Al Jazeera’s lifeblood. The history of human suffering seemingly begins and ends with that of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation and that of the Iraqis under erstwhile American occupation.

Source: The Atlantic, Why I Love Al Jazeera

At home on the silk road

The city of Yiwu in China, a magnet for thousands of Muslim traders from the Middle East, has become an economic and cultural bridge between the Asian economic giant and the Arab world. David Eimer reports.


Two thousand years ago, China was linked to the Arab world by the camel caravans that carried silk and spices from the ancient city of Xi’an along the fabled Silk Road. Now, their modern-day equivalents are the lorries loaded with shipping containers that line the road out of Yiwu. Last year, more than 500,000 shipping containers left this city in south-east China for the nearby port of Ningbo. And with 20 per cent of them bound for Dubai alone, the majority end their journey in the Middle East and its surrounding countries.

Since 2001, Yiwu has emerged as the centre of a new Silk Road that is binding the economies of China and the Arab world ever closer. The presence of the world’s biggest market for small commodities has combined with the shift in the Muslim world’s relationship with the US and Europe post 9/11, to make Yiwu as well-known a name to Middle Eastern traders as Xi’an once was.

“Yiwu is famous among business people,” says Awar Agreeb. Originally from Aden in Yemen, Agreeb first came to China in 2001 to study and now works as a translator and fixer for Arab traders visiting Yiwu. “My customers are from all over the Middle East and North Africa: Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Morocco. I think Yiwu is popular with Arabs because the prices are low and so they can make a profit.”

With an estimated 200,000 Arab traders passing through Yiwu each year, along with many others from Pakistan, India, central Asia and Africa, parts of the city have become synonymous with both Arabs and Muslims. In the Shang Mao Qu district, Egyptian and Iraqi restaurants with menus in Arabic sit alongside those run by Chinese Muslims. The nearby cafes bustle at night, with people smoking shishas, drinking mint tea and playing backgammon, while Al-Jazeera plays in the background. “It reminds me of Aqaba,” says one visiting Jordanian.

On Fridays, the streets outside Yiwu’s main mosque further reinforce the impression that it has one foot in the Middle East. Men from the Gulf states wearing pristine dishdashas join Pakistanis dressed in shalwar kemeez and North Africans in jeans to eat kebabs and flatbread before prayers. “When I first came to Yiwu in 2002, there were only about 200 foreigners who came to the mosque. Now, we get around 4,000 on Fridays. Most are Arabs, but we get a lot from Pakistan and Afghanistan, too,” says Mohammed Abdullah, the Chinese imam at the mosque.

While the mosques are packed on Fridays, it is commerce that brings most people to Yiwu, and its commercial hub is the Futian Market. Stretching for almost four kilometres and housing 62,000 stalls selling 1.7 million types of goods, Futian is like a giant supermarket for small commodities. Everything from clothes and cosmetics, to electrical appliances, along with the batteries and plugs needed to power them, and jewellery, toys and watches are available here at bargain prices.

Unlike the markets in other commercial hubs in China, such as Guangzhou in the south, Futian doesn’t specialise in a single product. Instead, it’s possible to find any conceivable commodity in its cavernous corridors spread between several buildings in the city. It’s that convenience that has made it a byword for traders from the Arab region. “Futian has everything under one roof and all the factories from around China have agents in the market,” says Foad Farajyan, an Iranian who buys air-conditioning units in Futian to sell in Iran and Iraq.

Although some traders hire translators, most rely on sign language to communicate and calculators to bargain. Profit margins seem small, until you take into account that business in Futian is done in bulk. “I can buy a watch here for 25 yuan (Dh13.5) and I’ll sell it in Cairo for 27 yuan. But I’ll fill up half a shipping container with watches and use the other half for jewellery,” says Mahamoud Adil, 32, an Egyptian on his seventh trip to Yiwu.

Located in Zhejiang Province, a four-hour drive south of Shanghai and a small city by Chinese standards, with a population of two million, Yiwu makes an unlikely boomtown. Before 2001, it was little known in China, let alone the Middle East. But then the September 11 attacks happened, and three months later to the day, China joined the World Trade Organisation.

The effects of the two events were immense. China threw open its doors to traders from anywhere on the planet, just as the US and Europe were slamming theirs shut to people from the Muslim world. “After September 11, a lot of Arabs who invested in Europe and the USA realised that they would have to choose different countries to invest in. So they started to look at Asia and especially China,” says Ye Ping, a Chinese Muslim who formerly published a newspaper in Yiwu for the Muslim community.

With visas for the US and Europe much harder to attain and China’s factories going into overdrive churning out low-cost goods, China quickly became the number-one option for Muslim businessmen. “Where else can I do business? America?” says Khalil Ali, a trader from Baghdad who has been coming to Yiwu for four years. “You can get a visa for China in a day.”

That ease of access has resulted in a profound change in the way Arabs and Muslims regard China. “I think the relationship between the Arab world and China is much better now than the relationship between the Middle East and Europe and the US,” says Foad Farajyan. “In Europe, people think Arabs, Iranians, Pakistanis are terrorists. Here, no one cares about that. The Chinese just think about business. They don’t care about politics or nationality. I’ve never had a discussion with a Chinese person about politics.”

China is keen to put trade above ideology when it comes to the Middle East, not least because it is so oil-thirsty. Exports to the 22 countries of the Arab League reached US$62billion (Dh228bn) last year, a huge jump from 2001’s total of $7billion. Dubai alone imported $2billion worth of goods from Yiwu in 2008, almost a third of Yiwu’s GDP of $7.2billion, according to figures from the local government. By 2010, Beijing hopes exports to the Middle East will reach $100billion.

In reviving its commercial links with the Arab world, China has a historical advantage over other nations too. Although the heyday of the Silk Road was well over a 1,000 years ago, the trade routes that stretched across India and Central Asia to the Middle East date back 3,000 years. And they carried more than just mere goods. Cultural and religious ideas crossed the borders too; some of China’s estimated 40 million Muslims are descended from the Arab traders who travelled the Silk Road.

For Ye Ping, Yiwu is now fulfilling the same function that the camel caravans once did. “Yiwu is helping reconnect China with the Middle East. The city has become an economic and cultural bridge between China and the Arab world. When I went to Iran for the first time, around per cent of the products I saw were made in China. That made me feel very proud,” she says.

Yiwu’s local government facilitates that trade by making it easier for foreigners to get residents’ visas and to register companies than it is in other Chinese cities. Equally important is the willingness of the Chinese to give credit. “The first time the customer buys he pays upfront, but the second time they don’t have to. From then on, we do everything on trust. I don’t even ask to see a passport,” says Zhu Shun, whose family runs a shop in Futian Market selling plugs made in factories in nearby Hangzhou and Wenzhou.

Increasing numbers of Arabs are now choosing to move to Yiwu permanently. No precise figures are available, but several thousand live here, running trading and cargo companies, or restaurants. Most cite the welcoming attitude of the locals and the stable nature of Chinese society, as well as the lack of prejudice towards Muslims, as the reasons to make Yiwu home.

“I’ve been here for four years and I’ve decided not to go back to Iraq. The life here is safe and the people are peaceful,” says Aram Qader from Sulaimanya in Northern Iraq. “Now, I plan to marry a Chinese woman.”

Saddam’s power refuses to fade

Baghdad // When Saddam Hussein was executed and buried near his hometown, Iraq’s new rulers feared his grave would become a place of pilgrimage and a focal point around which those wishing to revive the banned Baath Party would gravitate.

In the 2½ years since the former dictator’s death, there has been a steady stream of visitors wishing to pay their respects to the man the United States went to war to overthrow.

The graveyard trips always rankled with the new Iraqi authorities, drawn from the Shiite majority that the former dictator had so ruthlessly oppressed. But the government made a point of downplaying the issue, viewing the pro-Saddam visitors as a tiny minority that would only gain publicity if barred from going to the grave.

But recently concern about the well-wishers hit a new high with the circulation of a video showing young schoolgirls on an organised outing standing by the grave in Awja, near Tikrit, and singing Saddam’s praises.

It was a step too far for a government that is desperately trying to put Saddam’s legacy far behind it, and which is still fighting a deadly insurgency that is in part orchestrated by Saddam loyalists, including his right-hand man, Izzat Ibrahim al Douri, who remains at large.

In response to the video, the authorities in Baghdad issued an order last week outlawing organised trips by schools in Salahaddein province, of which Tikrit is the administrative capital, instructing the local council to prevent such outings.

The move was greeted with defiance and dismay by some in the town where the former Iraqi leader was born.

“No one will be able to stop us visiting the grave of Saddam Hussein, even if the government sends the entire Iraqi army to stand in our way,” said Abu Mohammad al Tikriti, a 55-year-old who attended Saddam’s burial. “If we have to dig a tunnel under the dirt to get into the graveyard then we will.”

Mr al Tikriti, from the same tribe as Saddam, said the move to ban visits was proof of the deposed leader’s lingering power over a country that he ruled with an iron fist for decades.

“The real people of Iraq know Saddam was a courageous leader and they want to come and express their love for him,” he said in an interview. We have many people from north to south, from Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds who come here to thank Saddam for what he did for them and for Iraq.

“Of course the government is worried about this; they are frightened by the wrath of the Iraqi people, of their power and they are frightened by the prospect of a new revolution that will overthrow them.”

Saddam’s supporters insist he was not a brutal dictator, but instead was a hard man who had no choice but to rule a divided country without mercy. They continue to view him as an Arab champion who prevented Iranian expansion into the Middle East, and remain proud of his role in modernising Iraq, a country that in the 1970s was the most advanced in the region; it was wealthy, secular, had high-quality health care and education, and close ties with the West. They accuse the new Shiite-dominated government of being pro-Iranian and driven by a sectarian agenda.

Although Saddam’s opponents may concede that Iraq did modernise under his rule, they say it happened at too high a price: he jailed and murdered any political opposition, dragged Iraq into a pointless and costly eight-year war with Iran and then steered Iraq, via a disastrous invasion of Kuwait, into 10 years of crippling sanctions before, once again, heading into a war with the United States, this conflict his last. Abu Ziad, a businessman from Tikrit, said in an interview that he still planned to push ahead with plans to build a museum as a monument to Saddam Hussein’s legacy.

“Saddam spent years fighting for Iraq’s unity and prosperity, and he fought against the colonial ambitions of the Americans,” he said.

“Saddam was a strong and historic commander, which is why Iraqis from all over the country still visit his grave.

“I want to expand the grave and make it a sacred shrine for all Iraqis, just as the [Islamic] religious shrines in Najaf and Kerbala are sacred. For lovers of independence and freedom, for the Arabs, Saddam’s shrine will be a place of pilgrimage.”

Abu Ziad, who asked that his full name be withheld from publication for fear of retribution by the government, said he had amassed a collection of Saddam memorabilia, and that he was biding his time to display it.

“I have many of Saddam’s personal possessions which were recently purchased for the museum project, and a huge number of photographs and pictures.

“I cannot start the museum now because our government is loyal to Iran. But after it collapses and we have a true Iraqi national government, then the museum will open.

“Even Americans will come to visit it because they are obsessed with Saddam.” Claims that the Baathist leader, hanged in Baghdad in 2006, still commands wide support and respect were dismissed as exaggeration by Khaled Salam Low, a professor at Tikrit University.

“There have been some visits to the grave, by relatives and admirers but not enough for it to be relevant, not enough that it is of any importance,” he said. “There are Baathists who want to keep the image of Saddam alive so they are actually paying schools in Tikrit to organise these grave visits.

“It is part of an information war, the Baathists want to cement support and try to push their electoral ambitions.”

Mr Low said the decision to ban visits could prove counterproductive, but that the Iraqi authorities were justified in doing so.

“This is about the security of the state and the government can take what steps its thinks are needed, and I think they will have support if they stop any sectarian strife or violence. They have not banned all visits and I think even this step of banning schools will be temporary.”

JISC: Islamic Manuscripts

Press Release

JISC helps bring Islamic resources online for the first time. Two of the oldest known copies of the Qur’an will be available to researchers and scholars across the world today (July 8th 2009) – as part of a major project to digitise one of the richest collections of Eastern manuscripts.
The two Qur'ans, one of which may date from the 7th century A.D, are part of the priceless Mingana Collection, which is housed by the University of Birmingham.
The University's Special Collections department has painstakingly digitised more than 10,000 pages from the collection. As well as the Qur'ans the documents now online include unique illustrated manuscripts from the 16th century and early Arabic poetry. The project has been generously supported by JISC and The Edward Cadbury Charitable Trust.
Dr Peter Robinson from the Department of Theology, who has led the project,comments: “We’re delighted that for the first time some of the oldest and rarest Arabic manuscripts will be available for the public and scholars to view and enjoy.
“The Qur'ans are astonishing: one (number 1572) may date from within a century of the death of the prophet Mohammed. This would make it one of the oldest copies of the Qur'an in existence. However, the collection also includes poetry, illustrated texts and even coins covering nearly 1000 years.
“The process of digitising these fragile manuscripts can be painstaking, but the result is something that is a beautiful reproduction of the original.”
The Mingana Collection is unique, spanning more than 3000 manuscripts in 11 languages across nearly 1000 years of history. The team is now intending to continue the project to complete the digitising of the 3000 texts that make up the collection.
Another key part of the project is the Virtual Manuscript Room, which aims to make the manuscripts accessible to scholars and the general public across the world. This is done by embedding information about individual pages and passages of text.
By making searching for information far easier and more effective the Birmingham team hope that scholars will be able to comment on the works, add them to other websites and share them with the world.
Dr Robinson adds: “We don’t want these fabulous documents to be a static archive that is hard to access and use.
“A collection like Mingana ought to be viewed, commented on and added to.Technology provides an ideal opportunity to create an archive like that.
“We sometimes have very little information about the history of individual documents so we want to share them and get opinions and input from across the globe.”
Ben Showers, programme manager at JISC said: “There is a lack of high-quality digital material available for those studying Islamic Studies.The Mingana manuscripts, presented via the Virtual Manuscripts Room (VMR), will therefore be a valuable resource for researchers and teachers, both in the UK and internationally.
“Their presentation online is a crucial part of JISC’s £1.8 million ‘enriching digital resources programme’, a set of 25 projects which enhances the use of online content for teaching, learning and research.”
The virtual manuscript room can be viewed at: http://www.vmr.bham.ac.uk Find
out more about JISC's enrich digitisation programme at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/digitisation/enrichingdigi.aspx
Additional information about the University of Birmingham's Special Collections can be found at: http://www.special-coll.bham.ac.uk

Egypt Needs Democracy and Term Limits: Mubarak competes with Ramses II for time in office.

By SAAD EDDIN IBRAHIM

Egyptians have traditionally thought of their country as the "Mother of the World." President Barack Obama says he wants to change the world. Egypt may very well be a good place to start.

Egyptians at home and abroad have been clamoring for change. Kefaya, which literally means "enough," is a slogan, an outcry, and a grassroots movement that has been organizing to reform our antique regime. Over 1,000 acts of civil disobedience have taken place all over Egypt in recent months. Participants have included the Bedouins of Sinai, the Nubians of Aswan, and even the Coptic monks of Upper Egypt.

Obviously, an American president elected on a platform of change is music to Egyptians' ears, and Mr. Obama will be a welcome guest. He is universally popular with Egyptians, Arabs and Muslims. But will average Egyptians really connect with him, let alone get a chance to meet him? With only 10 hours in the country, his visit will be carefully choreographed. Security forces will understandably separate him from the eager Egyptian crowds. Mr. Obama should consider scheduling a town meeting with representatives of Egyptian civil society. He had such a meeting when he visited France.

Mr. Obama will meet an Egyptian president who is still grieving over the untimely death in May of his 13-year-old grandson Mohammed. Despite the special bond between the two, Hosni Mubarak did not appear at the boy's funeral, or at that of the prime minister's wife a week earlier. This has led to widespread rumors about his health. Yet no native reporter dared to raise a question about the matter, as it is against the law to do so.

Mr. Mubarak is the third-longest serving Egyptian ruler in the country's last 2,000 years of recorded history. He has refused to step down or even appoint a vice president. There is widespread apprehension that he is grooming his son Gamal (46) to inherit the "throne." Over 60% of Egypt's population was born during Mr. Mubarak's tenure and have not known any other ruler. Many of them want "change" and are waiting anxiously for someone to help them bring it about.

Let's hope that whatever else he may have pressing -- Palestine, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan -- Mr. Obama will try to be that change agent. One remarkable thing he can do for Egypt and the rest of the Muslim world is to offer American help in making governance more sound. He should promote the rule of law by promoting democratic elections and term limits for democratically elected presidents.

This may appear to be long shot. Mr. Obama's advisers will likely argue against it to avoid offending his host. But such a bold move would win him the hearts and minds of the world's 1.4 billion Muslims forever. With his legendary gift for communication, Mr. Obama should find a way to propose the idea and offer a Marshall-like plan of financial incentives. He can then call on Egyptians and other Muslims to do the rest.

Mr. Ibrahim, an Egyptian sociologist and human rights advocate, was imprisoned by the Mubarak regime. He has lived in exile since 2007 and is currently a visiting professor at Harvard.

Does Islam Need A Reformation?

Some are trying to understand Islam from the perspective of the history of Christianity. To answer Thom Hartmann's question: No, Islam does not need a Reformation. But some Muslims do, notes Hesham A. Hassaballa.


One day recently, I heard progressive radio host Thom Hartmann speak about whether Islam needs a "reformation" similar to that in Judaism or Christianity. It happened in the wake of the pirate attacks on American ships in the Indian Ocean, and the implication that al-Qaeda was behind the pirates (a dubious claim). In fact, Hartmann had been posited this question to a number of Muslim callers on his show during those days: "Is it time for a reformation in Islam?"

It does seem to me that given the often terrible news about Islam, it is understandable why this question would be raised in the first place. When people see constant references to vicious barbarity: beheadings, suicide bombings, public flogging, "honor killing" -- all done explicitly in the name of Islam -- it is only natural to wonder whether Islam itself is the problem. Yet, as tempting as it is to apply the Christian experience as analogy, it is a flawed premise.

The Protestant Reformation was a movement during the 16th and 17th centuries to reform the Catholic Church. It sought to change various beliefs and practices that were fundamental to the Church at the time, such as purgatory, particular judgment (the judgment of a soul immediately after death), devotion to Mary, devotion to the saints, most of the sacraments, mandatory celibacy, and the authority of the Pope. Of course, in Great Britain, the divorce of the Church of England from Rome was performed by Henry VIII, after he was denied an annulment from his wife by Pope Clement VII. Even in this case, it was a new church started in reaction to ‘wrong’ beliefs in the Roman Catholic Church.

That is the problem in trying to understand Islam from the perspective of the history of Christianity. There is no such corollary in Islam: The barbarity that is done in the name of Islam is a deviation from fundamental beliefs, principles, and traditions of Islam. Extremism in the name of Islam is nothing new to the faith: It began soon after the death of the Prophet Muhammad with the Kharijites, who ended up killing the fourth Caliph Ali ibn Abi Talib. After the Kharijites came the Hashasheen, or "Assassins," who were Islam's first "suicide terrorists." They terrorized the Muslim populace for decades. And in contemporary times, we have the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Yet, throughout Islam's history, these extremists have always been a tiny fringe minority who follow clearly heretical belief systems and are always rejected by the overwhelming majority of Muslims. The Islamic mainstream has always endured and won out against the extremists. Today, there are some people who want the world to think that the Muslim extremists are somehow the "mainstream." Yet, only a criminal mind could cite the Qur'an to justify the murder of innocent people having lunch at Sbarro's, or worshipping at a mosque on Friday, or buying fruit at the market. Just because a terrorist says "the Qur'an says so" does not make it the truth any more than it does if a terrorist used verses from the Bible.

Let us take suicide terrorism as an example. Everything about it violates Islam and its principles. The Qur'an says: "And do not take a life that God has made sacred, except for just cause" (17:33). In no way, shape, or form could the taking of innocent life be considered "just cause." Moreover, as in Jewish and Christian scriptures and traditions, suicide is a grave sin:

"And spend for the sake of God, and do not invest in ruin by your own hands. And do good, for God loves those who do good" (2:195).

"And do not kill yourselves, for God has been merciful to you" (4:29).

Thus, the crime of suicide is clearly a deviation from Islamic faith and practice -- therefore, rejected by the vast majority of Muslims.

If Islam needed a "reformation," that would mean that suicide terrorism against "non-believers" is part of Islamic belief and needs to be "expunged" in the interest of bringing Islam into the 21st century. But, the truth is suicide terrorism has never been part of Islamic belief; it has always been an ugly deviation.

This does not mean, in any way, shape, or form, that a good number of Muslims are not in need of reformation. On the contrary, there needs to be a wholesale reformation of Muslims on a number of fronts. But whenever we see Muslims acting like barbarians, they are betraying the principles of Islam, they are violating the letter and spirit of the faith.

If every Muslim everywhere had kept to the principles of Islam, there would be no suicide terrorism; there would be no beheading of people in front of a banner saying "There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His Messenger"; there would be no "honor killing." Sadly, however, these things do happen, and it is because some few Muslims have strayed from the straight and narrow path of Islam -- or are faithlessly using the religion in an abominable way.

So, to answer Thom Hartmann's question: No, Islam does not need a Reformation. But some Muslims do.

Hesham A. Hassaballa is a physician and writer living in Chicago. He is co-author of The Beliefnet Guide to Islam (Doubleday).

The Return of the Ottoman Empire?

By Mshari Al-Zaydi

A Saudi journalist and expert on Islamic movements and Islamic fundamentalism as well as Saudi affairs. Mshari is Asharq Al-Awsat’s opinion page Editor, where he also contributes a weekly column. Has worked for the local Saudi press occupying several posts at Al -Madina newspaper amongst others. He has been a guest on numerous news and current affairs programs as an expert on Islamic extremism.

The only way one can explain the heated return of “Ottoman” Turkey to the Middle East quagmire is as the setting up of a suitable position for the Turkish Fez in the new Middle East division.

This is what some Turkish intellects have argued according to Serkan Taflioglu, a researcher of Middle East affairs at ASAM, the Center for Eurasian Strategic Studies in Ankara. “Heated Turkish political movements dealing with Middle East issues, which have increased over the past few months, are based on the Turkish belief that the future of developments in the Middle East will depend, to a large extent, on the kind of relationship that exists between Iran and the US over the next couple of years,” said Taflioglu. Moreover, he indicated that Turkey’s deep involvement is motivated by Ankara’s desire to assume its natural role in the region in accordance with its power and interests. But as Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Recep Erdogan speaks about the children in Gaza who are being slaughtered, we know that feelings alone are not the driving force behind political activity.

Turkey is now turning towards its Ottoman past after neglecting it for so long; not in order to restore its former glories as some naïve and nostalgic supporters of Islamic parties might believe, but rather to establish an effective presence for the Turkish state that suits its historical, political and economic significance in the region.

Iran ventured into Arab affairs at an early stage, ever since the Khomeini revolution. This revolutionary fervor died down for a while due to the outbreak of war between the Khomeini state and the Baath state of Iraq. That was followed by the Rafsanjani and Khatami eras, before blatant Iranian penetration of Arab issues such as Palestine and Lebanon began to take place during the reign of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iran’s role in the region increased and the Arabs could not keep up with Iran’s craftiness and Tehran’s skillful political maneuvering.

Turkey noticed how Iran’s early involvement in Iraq had achieved gains for it on the ground and how that had created a central political power that was so firmly linked to Iran. In other words, Iran’s bold venture into Iraqi affairs forced the US and the Arabs to acknowledge its role in the region. Iran continued to follow this approach in Lebanon and Palestine and today we are seeing the results: Hezbollah’s indirect rule over Lebanon by virtue of Iranian backing and a similar situation in the Palestinian territories. Furthermore, we know nothing about other Iranian schemes in the Gulf region, Yemen or North Africa.

The game proved to be a real advantage to Iran, so it decided to liquefy its old political investments in Lebanon and Palestine as the world watched the inauguration of the new US administration, which says that it is different to the former Bush administration and that it is willing to listen to everyone without imposing America’s visions upon others.

Like Iran, Turkey has an imperialistic past in our region. The only empire that contended with Ottoman Turkey over power in the region was Safavid Iran. Ferocious battles took place in the ruthless confrontation between the Ottomans and the Safavids, and Iraq itself was one of their battlefields. Baghdad fell under the rule of the Safavid Persian Shah and then would be conquered by the Ottoman Turkish Sultan. Much of the vehement sectarianism that we witness today is a product of that ancient and fierce imperialistic conflict between Iran and Turkey, or the Safavids and the Ottomans, or the Sunnis and the Shia. In the end however, it was a confrontation in which the Arabs did not play a fundamental role; they were marginal to the situation.

The Arab masses have demonstrated support for Erdogan and it is most likely that they are the same people who live on Muslim Brotherhood dogmas or those who have been impressed by them. This support increases whenever the public remembers that Erdogan reminded Israel that he is a descendant of the Ottomans. When we hear this, our minds run wild and we conjure up the image of Mehmet II the Conqueror returning to the gates of Tel Aviv and the return of the Ottoman Sultan. We imagine that Erdogan has awoken Turkey from its deep sleep and hoisted the flag of the Ottomans once again. All these dreams, which our fellow citizens in our Arab countries use to heal their wounds, do not necessarily represent the objectives of Turkey, the NATO member state, which is pushing to be part of the European Union. These dreams do not necessarily represent the secular state that is ruled by regulations of a strict secular constitution and guarded by generals who see themselves as the guardians of the Ataturk structure.

The intensity of support for Erdogan, the new Ottoman Sultan, reached its peak after the incident that took place at the Davos Economic Forum when he addressed the Israeli President Shimon Peres and walked out of the session in a dignified manner, returning to Istanbul as a conqueror. Such support of course is supposed to have some kind of effect on the “weak” Arabs so that they may take a stand just like Erdogan.

The truth is that Erdogan did not adopt an actual stance that could count as a political measure. He took a stand that would be popular with the masses. To take a real stand would result in achieving concrete political, military and security gains on the ground; embodied in agreements through acts of negotiation. This is what is happening at present in Cairo between Hamas and Israel through Egyptian mediation, which could also pave the way for inter-Palestinian reconciliation under the sponsorship of Egypt. However, it is difficult to imagine reconciliation whilst Hamas relies heavily upon the Syrian-Iranian camp.

Speaking of Syria, the interview that President Bashar al Assad gave to Al Manar television was an important interview that followed the Kuwait Summit where there was a reconciliatory atmosphere initiated by Saudi King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz during the summit itself. But the King’s initiative was not well-received; in the interview, President al Assad stressed the importance of Syrian-Turkish ties as well as the importance of Syrian-Iranian ties.

Are we facing a semi-objective coalition in the region at the expense of all Arab countries (except Syria) that consists of Iran, Turkey, Syria and Israel, all struggling to control war and peace? Iran is aggravating the issue so as to further strengthen its position and force the USA, the international community and the Arabs in the region not to make it give up the power that it has gained.

Turkey, which woke up recently, wants to partake in the power struggle, according to Serkan Taflioglu who said that Turkey is busy trying to understand the new agreement in the region whereas Israel, as usual, wants to maintain its power in the region. As for Syria, it believes that the smart thing to do would be to abandon the Arab ship and seek shelter in Iran or Turkey to protect it from the region’s flooding waters.

Turkey believes that it is more capable than Iran to deal with the issues of Palestine and Lebanon firstly because it is also a predominantly Sunni country and secondly because of its nostalgia for the Ottoman state. Such longing is continually backed by the Muslim Brotherhood and some fundamentalist parties. However, this longing does not exist amongst nationalist movements or the Levant Arabs, or perhaps the Salafists of the Arab Peninsula who do not have fond memories of the Turkish Ottoman oppression.

The Muslim Brotherhood says that the collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate in Turkey is one of the reasons that it exists (Saad Hawi, a Syrian Muslim Brotherhood figure, in his book entitled ‘Hedi Tajribati wa Hedi Shahadati’, p37).

Because of long-standing nostalgia, the ailment of political legitimacy that they believe has been absent since the fall of the Ottoman Caliphate, the antagonism with Arab countries, and Iran’s attack on Arab countries that oppose the radical Iranian bloc, we now see the Brotherhood exaggerating its praise of Erdogan after it failed to publicize Khamanei and Ahmadinejad in the Arab world because of the sensitive issue of sectarianism, which is a fundamental part of the ailing culture in the region.

Nevertheless, we must admit that Turkey is different to Iran; it is not a fundamentalist state. This is why the Turkish Foreign Minister Ali Babacan sought to remind everyone of Turkey’s secularism with the demand that Hamas becomes a pure political movement if it wants Turkey’s support. These all are messages to the West in order to maintain its trust.

“Turkey is a NATO ally and will not cut ties with Israel,” which would be reckless according to Babacan. But Erdogan is taking such action so as to activate Turkey’s new role. Israel will not be harmed by this. Peres had a friendly chat with Erdogan soon after the “Davos incident” during which the two men reiterated the friendly relations between Turkey and Israel.

Nobody would disagree with Erdogan’s comments on the children of Gaza because what happened in the Gaza Strip was an awful crime. But it seems that his comments had also provoked those suffering from the anger of the Turks such as the Turkish Kurds who need Erdogan to show more humanity towards them. Emine Ayna, Co-Chairperson of the Democratic Society Party was quoted saying, “Erdogan also knows how to kill, and the only nation that can say to Peres that he knows well how to kill children and women is the Kurdish nation because it is being killed by bombs,” according to the Lebanese As-Safir Newspaper.

The question remains however; where do the Arab countries fit in to this political bazaar that is now being set up?

Middle East web writers 'harassed'

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) says five Middle Eastern and North African countries are among the world's "worst online oppressors", intimidating and imprisoning journalists and bloggers.

In its report - The ten worst countries to be a blogger - released a few days ahead of a conference organised by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Social Organisation (Unesco) in Doha, CPJ said bloggers were at most risk in Egypt, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia.

Burma topped the list for its severe restrictions on internet use and censorship. China was named as the country with the most comprehensive online censorship policies.

Iran was listed as the Middle East's worst offender for its continued harassment and intimidation of bloggers. Omidreza Mirsayafi, an Iran-based blogger, was cited by the CPJ report as having died in prison "under circumstances that have not been fully explained".

Targeting the web

According to an earlier study by the CPJ, 45 per cent of all imprisoned media workers world wide are bloggers, web-based reporters, or online editors.

Of the 125 journalists currently imprisoned around the world, some 56 are web-based journalists and writers. The organisation says 2009 marks the first time the number of jailed online writers surpasses the number of detained print journalists.

Nora Younis, an Egyptian blogger and journalist, explains the trend by saying that "bloggers are nowadays taken seriously by authorities as well as Arab media", a significant change from a few years ago when she said bloggers used to be ignored.

Bloggers in countries like Egypt, Syria, and Tunisia say they have become instrumental in exposing human rights issues like police brutality, torture, and sexual harassment which has made regional governments undertake increasingly aggressive means to curb cyber-dissidence.

Naila Hamdy, a professor of journalism at the American University in Cairo, says that the political and cultural challenges posed by new media have taken Arab governments by surprise.

"So far, unregulated satellite has brought fuelling of sectarian wars, political dissent and opposing views," she told Al Jazeera in a previous interview.

"With the possibility of thousands more stations and other technologies catching on in a second ... I think that those in government responsible for information regulation have realised that they are a decade behind. They are now trying to address this new era."

The voiceless speak

In 2007, Kareem Amer was given a four-year sentence for 'insulting' Egypt's president
Nevertheless, bloggers in the Middle East are making their voices heard. In Egypt, they took an active part in organising widespread anti-government activities, rallying pro-Hariri protesters in Lebanon, mounting anti-corruption campaigns in Libya and electioneering in Kuwaiti elections.

They have exposed the grim realities of everyday life in war-torn Iraq. In the Gulf, female bloggers are increasingly going online calling for change in a display of growing assertiveness.

More broadly, Arab bloggers continue to break cultural and religious taboos: discussing the social and political malaise afflicting the Arab world, exploring sexual identities and challenging the dominant institutions of religion, state and family.

Ahmed Al Omran, the owner of Saudi Jeans, a Saudi Arabian blog, is one of the most influential in the Gulf region; he hopes to "be a part of the change that is taking place in Saudi Arabia".

Arguing that much of the media in the region does not reflect realities on the ground, he uses his blog as an "agent of change" to push for social justice and greater citizen involvement in the country's affairs.

For him, "human rights, freedom of expression and women's rights are all important issues that our nation will need to tackle on the way to change".

But persecution of cyber-dissidents has became a reality in Saudi Arabia, which has detained bloggers for "violating the kingdom's regulations".

Thirty-two-year-old Fouad al-Farhan was arrested in December 2007 and his computers seized for criticising the pace of reforms in the kingdom.

He was held in solitary confinement at Dahban prison in Jeddah until his release in late April 2008.

Travel bans

But some countries have also in recent years imposed travel bans on bloggers and journalists as a means of applying pressure.

Said Essoulami, the executive director of the Morocco-based Centre for Media Freedom in the Middle East and North Africa, believes the bans are designed to control dissident writers and activists.

"Retaliations such as assassination and imprisonment of writers have been reduced because there are new ways of controlling journalists," he said.

Essoulami said several journalists and bloggers have been barred from participating in international media conferences.

He pointed to the Third Arab Free Press Forum held in Beirut in December 2008 and said many key dissident writers such as Saudi Arabian blogger Fouad Al-Farhan, Mazen Darwish, the director of the Syrian Centre for Media and Freedom of Expression, and Tunisian journalist Litfi Hidouri had been prevented from participating.

"In fact, every journalist invited from Syria could not come," Essoulami said.

Harassment

Related articles



Perils of blogging in Egypt
Egyptian blogger sentenced to jail
Censorship in Cyberspace
Arab bloggers defy arrest
Bloggers have been detained in many countries -including Bahrain, Egypt, Morocco, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, Tunisia - for the views they expressed on their blogs.

Authorities in these countries are stepping up their efforts to filter such websites. Saudi Arabia blocks thousands of websites and Bahrain is trying to register bloggers, in further signs of a clampdown.

In 2007, Egyptian writer Kareem Amer was imprisoned for "insulting Islam and President Hosni Mubarak" on his blog. He is currently serving a four-year sentence at Borg Al-Arab prison outside Alexandria.

In Syria, blogger Tariq Baissi was sentenced to three years in prison for "weakening the national feeling and the national ethos". Biassi had posted a six word long comment in a web forum in which he criticised the Syrian security services. Numerous other cyber dissidents remain behind bars in Syria.

In Tunis, Nazira Rijba, a Tunisian writer and activist, was in late 2008 charged over an article she wrote in support of the Tunisian news website Kalima which has been subject to censorship by the Tunisian authorities.

She says she is regularly harassed over the Interphone at her house and on the street by the authorities for her work and activism.

"Do not think of us as victims," she said. "We are militants who are being harassed by the government. We are paying the price of freedom, but freedom is the door for change."

Fadi Zaghmout, a Jordanian web developer, uses The Arab Observer blog to write about personal freedoms and tolerance in the Middle East.

His blog sometimes courts controversy because it discusses topics such as sexual freedoms, women's issues, homosexuality and gender equality.

He says he has also been cataloguing underreported cases of sexual harassment of women in the Arab street, honour crimes, and the social pressures on young Arabs - particularly women - to get married.

Increased pressure

Koukha Mansour, a media analyst based in Syria, says journalists and bloggers in the Middle East are likely to continue to face excessive censorship and the fear of being threatened, harassed, or imprisoned in the years to come.

"Middle East media should unify their efforts and establish a liberated journalists union that reinforces the freedom of press and work independently from any governmental or 'lobby' interests," she said.

"Journalists are using bloggers as sources more and more, quoting reports, videos, and photos," Rachid Jankari, a Moroccan journalist, told Al Jazeera.

Many internet activists believe the jailing of web writers will increase in the future, especially as more and more print journalists are said to be migrating to web-based work for various reasons, including censorship circumvention.

"It will increase, I'm sure, as more and more people are tasting the power of the internet and the usage of the web is spreading," said Sami Ben Gharbia, the Tunisia advocacy director of Global Voices, told Al Jazeera.

"We will see more of this detainment of online journalists in the future."

With additional reporting by Julian Madsen and David Stanford.

Muslims and the West Desperately Seeking Occidentalists

If relations between the West and the Muslim world are to be improved, writes Maulana Waris Mazhari, Muslims must make a serious attempt not only to study both the positive and the negative aspects of Western thought, civilisation and history, but also to learn from them

Maulana Waris Mazhari: "In many Muslim circles, hatred of the West is considered to be the biggest sign of religiousness" | The issue of strained relations between Muslims and the West is a long-standing one, and it has taken a new turn since the attacks of 9/11. In recent years, much has been written on the subject by both Muslim and Western scholars. Following the publication of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilisations in the late 1990s, a large number of Western scholars concluded that reconciliation between Muslims and the West is impossible and that a clash between them is inevitable.

Influential Western think-tanks have aggressively pursued this line of thinking, as have extremist religious and political forces, particularly Christian evangelicals and Zionist organisations across Europe and America. In this context, the crucial question arises as to how the situation can be changed, as indeed it must. Do Muslims have any proper strategy or programme in this regard? My answer is firmly in the negative.

Superficial knowledge of the West

Despite the massive anti-Western movements and sentiments that have characterised much of the Muslim world over the last one hundred and fifty years, the fact remains that Muslim intellectuals, particularly the ulema, have only a very superficial understanding and knowledge of the West. In actual fact, there has been no serious attempt on the part of Muslim scholars to properly study and evaluate Western thought, civilization and history.

Today, our religious scholars have the same sort of stereotypical views about the West as the West had about Muslims and Islam several centuries ago at the time of the Crusades. Our religious scholars believe, and this is what they tell their followers, that the West simply stands for drunkenness, sexual license, immorality and all other sorts of wanton desires and pleasures.

Because of this approach we have not been able to learn from the good things that the West has to offer, not even about aspects of the Muslim scientific heritage that the West adopted from us and then built on.

Instead, in many Muslim circles, hatred of the West is considered to be the biggest sign of religiousness. This mentality developed during the colonial period, and it should have been done away with the end of the European colonial empires. However, instead of that happening, it has been greatly reinforced and strengthened, and has now become so deeply rooted that Muslim reformers find it virtually impossible to combat.

Critical, dispassionate study of the West necessary

Scores of institutions for the study of Islam and Muslim culture and history have been established in the West, and several Western universities have special departments dedicated to these fields. They have produced a massive amount of literature. In contrast, there are probably not even two or three scholarly institutions in the Muslim world devoted to the study of the West using modern scholarly methods.

Universities in Muslim countries should have set up departments of Western studies, and there should have been private- and government-funded institutions for the study of the West, but, unfortunately, none exist. We desperately need such institutions to study Western history and culture in a critical yet dispassionate way, so that Muslims can understand not only the limitations or drawbacks of contemporary Western civilisation, but also its virtues, which they could adopt.

Muslim double standards

Today, most Muslims have a double-standard approach to the West. On the one hand, many of them are vociferously opposed to the West and insist that Muslims should stay away from Western culture as far as possible. At the same time, many of them fervently desire to migrate to the West!

I have been twice to America, where I met several Muslims who brand America as "the Great Satan" but still continue to live there for the economic benefits and opportunities that America provides them. They show-off their American passports or, if they do not as yet have them, are impatiently awaiting the day when they will be granted American citizenship. Why, one must ask, these double-standards? If these Muslims are so anti-America, why don’t they leave the country and return to what they consider dar ul-Islam, "the abode of Islam", where many of them came from?

I believe that there are numerous aspects of Western culture and society that reflect the virtues that characterised the early history of Islam. In contrast, in many Muslim countries, groups that want to serve the cause of Islam are under severe restrictions. It is unfortunate that virtually the whole focus of Muslim groups in the West is on seeking to get recognition for Muslim cultural identity, often to the point of excess.

Take, for instance, the case of women’s dress. Hijab (modest dress) is adequate, yet some Muslims in the West make a big hue and cry, demanding that the naqab (face-veil) be allowed. Some go even further, unmindful of the fact that this might lead to a further escalation of anti-Muslim sentiment in society. Some extremist self-styled Islamic groups in the West, such as the Hizb ut-Tahrir, even raise the simplistic idea of establishing an Islamic Caliphate in the West, completely forgetting that the liberty to do so is not even available in the so-called dar ul-Islam.

The real conflict between Muslims and the West today is in the realm of ideas. Militarily, Muslims were defeated by the West two centuries ago, and, far from seriously hoping to overwhelm the West with military force, Muslim countries are thoroughly dependent on the West for military aid. In order to defend themselves effectively, Muslims must first understand the West, and for this we need Occidentalists, counterparts of the West’s Orientalists.

However, unlike the classical Orientalist approach to the Orient, these scholars should not be blindly critical of the West, but should, in an objective fashion, examine both its drawbacks and its virtues. Most Orientalists, as Edward Said so brilliantly pointed out in his magnum opus, Orientalism, did not adopt such a balanced approach, and actually served as tools of Western imperialism. The Muslim world, on the other hand, needs Occidentalists who evaluate the West objectively.

Islamophobia in the West

Some time ago, I met a Muslim professor who teaches at an American university. I asked him about the future of Muslims in America. He seemed very pessimistic and even said that Western countries might one day ask their Muslim citizens to leave. Personally, I do not think that this would be easy. Muslim and Western countries are too inter-dependent for that to happen.

This is why it is vital that they work seriously to counter the present climate of hatred and mistrust between Muslims and the West. Unfortunately, the simplistic approach and egotism of some Muslim groups in the West and the propaganda of some Christian and Jewish religious and semi-religious forces are giving a tremendous boost to Islamophobic sentiments across the West.

The practice of the Prophet Muhammad was to seek to create normal or settled conditions by accepting the terms and conditions set by his opponents in order to do away with the climate of hatred and conflict. This is what Muslims must seek to do, without compromising on the necessities of their faith.

Muslims must also desist from viewing the West and Western culture in stark, Manichaean terms. They must seek to learn from the good things that the West has to offer while abstaining from its draw-backs, for everything that is good, no matter what its source, is of value to the whole human community.

Maulana Waris Mazhari

Bombs away

Across the Arab and Muslim world, jihadists are beginning to renounce violence as a means to change their societies – and not just because they lost, writes Nathan Field.

The need for revival has been a central theme in recent Arab history: for more than a thousand years, Arab countries dominated (or at least saw themselves as dominating) their western rivals. But in the last two centuries, colonialism and globalisation made it painfully clear to Arab thinkers that their countries had fallen behind politically, economically and technologically. The region’s intellectuals have therefore long been preoccupied with devising ways to revive Arab society from its slumbers – and to return it to its previous glory.

Some looked outward in search of answers: for the great Egyptian writer Taha Hussein, who had studied in France, mimicking Western Europe was the key to revival since, in his view, Egypt had always been more Mediterranean than Eastern or Islamic. Like many in his era, Gamal Abdel Nasser looked favourably at how Soviet-style socialism had transformed Russia, a backwards agriculture-based economy, into an industrial super power in the span of two decades, and tried to apply that approach to Egypt.

For Islamists, most prominently the Muslim Brotherhood, the path to revival required a more inward -looking approach. In their view, countries like Egypt and Algeria had declined and fallen prey to colonial dominance because they had minimised the significance of Islam, the source of the society’s original greatness. Rather than copying non-Islamic models from the West, the Islamist approach has been to attempt a re-Islamicisation of Arab society, to rid it of corrupting western influences.

The majority of Islamists have always taken a peaceful approach to this reform process. But radical elements are a feature of most political movements, especially those aiming at reform; everywhere Islamist movements have flourished, small minority factions have seen violence – usually framed in the language of jihad – as a legitimate tool to change society. In Algeria and Egypt during the 1980s and 1990s, radical groups of this sort engaged in prolonged and bloody clashes with their governments – and similar, if smaller, battles, took place in Saudi Arabia, Libya and Morocco. To many outside observers, this violence appeared random and irrational, but we must understand it as the jihadists themselves did: as part of the same movement for reform that has been the dominant strain in Arab intellectual thought throughout the modern era.

During the last decade, however, this local violence has declined dramatically. In Egypt violence from organised militant groups has disappeared. The country’s two main jihadist groups, al Jihad and al Gama’a al Islamiyya, have both published books denouncing their past actions, usually referred to as the “Revisions”, and most of their members have since been released from jail. In Algeria, the overwhelming majority of the violent Islamists of the 1990s have embraced the National Reconciliation project and returned home. And in Saudi Arabia, several hundred arrested jihadists have passed through “rehabilitation” or “re-education” and been reintegrated back into society.

These developments have generally been regarded as separate and distinct events. There are differences, to be sure: in Egypt the shift came from within the jihadist movement, while in Saudi Arabia the state funded and sponsored the “re-education” programmes. But we must begin to understand them as local versions of a broader regional trend resulting from sustained religious reflection, in which jihadists have recognised the mistakes of their violent attempts at reform and begun to formulate non-violent alternatives. In the last three decades, small factions within the Islamist movement shifted decisively toward violence, but today we are seeing a reversal of this intellectual trend.

Some observers contend that the departure from violence has been caused not by internal reflection but by harsh treatment at the hands of the state. Egyptian intellectuals I have interviewed – many of them harsh critics of their government – tend to emphasise the brutality of the security forces as the critical factor driving the change. It is true, of course, that everywhere jihadists fought their governments they lost, and it cannot be denied that such defeats – and the long jail terms that followed – must have encouraged radicals to rethink their approach.

But there is ample evidence to suggest that jihadists reached this conclusion on their own, without being coerced into doing so. In Algeria, for example, there has been a spate of recent defections from the al Qa’eda-linked Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) with militants “coming down from the mountains” to surrender. When al Gama’a announced its initial ceasefire in 1997, it took Egyptian authorities, who viewed it as a trick, entirely by surprise. Several reports in the Arabic-language media have presented evidence of a non-violent turn inside al Jihad even before the group’s one-time leader, Sayyid Imam – also known as Dr Fadl – published his “Revisions” in 2007.

It seems likely, in fact, that religious reflection has been the most important factor in the move away from violence. Even violent radicals require some imprimatur from religious authorities, and in Algeria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, at least in the past, there were some among the ulema (the scholars who are the arbiters of Islamic law) who were ambivalent or approving – just enough legitimacy for a jihadi seeking it. There was also, at least initially, some degree of social support among the population for their actions.

But in each of these countries, the situation has changed as society – and more importantly, religious scholars – have turned strongly against violence. Given the emphasis on religious conformity in Islamic societies, no group claiming to act in the name of Islam and the people can retain support if both denounce its actions.

A recent Al-Hayat interview with Hassan Hattab, the founder of the Algerian Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, but now a major advocate of reconciliation, demonstrates this clearly. Asked why he embraced reconciliation after such a violent past, he pointed to the change in the ulema’s position: “We noticed that the ulema turned against the continuation of violence and this was an essential factor in our decision to stop operations. There wasn’t a single cleric who supported our fight against the government. Where previously they were silent about what was happening, now they take a clear position against the violence.”

Some commentators have argued that the retreat from violence is insincere, a ploy by jihadist factions to get themselves out of jail or obtain lenient treatment. In certain cases this may be true, but given that few of those released from jail have returned to violence, until they do, it is necessary to give them the benefit of the doubt.

We can measure the depth and seriousness of a group’s conversion by studying their efforts to formulate alternative strategies for reform. For while some jihadists have renounced violence as a means to reform, the conditions that drove them to violence in the first place have not changed.

Egypt’s al Gama’a al Islamiyya has gone the furthest. Not only did they denounce violence as a tool of change, outlined in several books published in 2002-2003, but it is trying, despite being prohibited from doing so, to enter mainstream politics. On its website, the group issues statements on current affairs not dramatically distinct from those of the Muslim Brotherhood or other groups considered mainstream. When Barack Obama was elected president in November, the group posted a statement congratulating him and called on him to repair relations with the Muslim world – hardly the type of behaviour associated with hard-core religious fanaticism.

Dr Fadl’s vaunted 2007 “Revisions” are not as significant as al Gama’a’s moves toward reform, as they do not lay out a formula for dealing with the conditions that drove the group to violence in the first place. Fadl merely says that trying to overthrow the ruler is wrong if the group does not have the ability to do so – which seems to imply it would be right if they did. Meanwhile, according to a recent article at Islam Online, the Libyan Armed Fighting Group, nominally affiliated with al Qa’eda, is on the verge of issuing its own “Revisions”, supposedly based on an even more far-reaching formula for reform than that of Egypt’s al Gama’a. If true, this would be extremely significant.

There are, of course, significant caveats to temper excess optimism about the end of jihadist violence. The trend toward non-violent means has included organised groups but not necessarily individuals or smaller factions. Most Egyptian analysts argue that violence has “stopped” but not “ended”: the underlying conditions remain unaltered and there is no predicting the actions of isolated violent individuals.

These revisions, furthermore, are relevant only to “near enemy” violence – against Arab states and populations – and may have little bearing outside of tactical readjustment on al Qa’eda actions against the United States or its allies. The revisions in Egypt, the Saudi re-education programme and the Algerian reconciliation are concerned only with the morality of Muslim-on-Muslim violence inside Muslim countries.

In every country there are some holdouts who refuse to accept this change, but they are a very small minority of the total number who once embraced violence. The broader trend – across the Arab world – reflects the firm position of Arab publics and Islamic scholars against internal violence, and it would appear a formidable obstacle to future groups who seek to affect change with violent means.

Nathan Field is a journalist who writes about Egyptian politics.